The Internet Blog

ACAPOR, a Portuguese organization which represents the interests of local movie rental companies, has been defaced by Anonymous as part of Operation Payback. The ACAPOR website currently shows a message from Anonymous and then redirects to The Pirate Bay. To make the shaming complete, a 640 MB email database of the outfit was leaked and posted to The Pirate Bay.

When the Portuguese movie rental outfit ACAPOR declared war on The Pirate Bay a few weeks ago, it was perhaps inevitable that it would have to deal with the wrath of Operation Payback. ACAPOR wanted to ensure that Portuguese citizens can’t access The Pirate Bay, and filed a complaint against the site.

The movie rental association claimed that The Pirate Bay is directly responsible for about 15 million illegal downloads in Portugal every year. By installing a Pirate Bay block at all ISPs, ACAPOR hopes to decrease the financial damage they claim it causes.

Aside from the complaint against The Pirate Bay, ACAPOR had also announced a separate case against Piratatuga.net, a site that links to various movie, game and music titles hosted on third party sites. With approximately 50,000 Portugese visitors a day this site is as popular in Portugal as The Pirate Bay, ACAPOR claimed.

In recent weeks dozens of outfits involved in anti-piracy efforts have been targeted by Anonymous, especially those who have targeted The Pirate Bay. Most victims suffer a few days of downtime because of a DDoS attack, but for ACAPOR the damage is much worse.

Just a few hours ago the outfit’s website was defaced, presenting the following message from Operation Payback. To make things even worse the website then redirects to The Pirate Bay after a few seconds.

And the trouble for ACAPOR doesn’t stop there.

In addition to defacing the website, the ‘hackers’ also managed to grab a copy of the email database of ACAPOR. Little is known about the content of the emails at the moment, but previous leaks from MediaDefender and ACS:Law have shone an interesting light on their operations.

Portuguese speaking readers who have more information on the contents of the leaked email database are encouraged to get in touch. To be continued.